Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
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Narrated by:
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Mike Chamberlain
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Danny Campbell
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By:
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David Lipsky
About this listen
An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace's Infinite Jest tour.
In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader's escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an orgy of spectation). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace's dogs.
Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things: everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him, in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him that grateful, awake feeling the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.
A biography in five days, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer.
©2010 David Lipsky (P)2010 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Artie Lange, Anthony Bozza
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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At a high point in his career, Artie Lange performed a sold-out show in Carnegie Hall-and he did it with a pocketful of heroin. In the midst of a deep, self-destructive depression, addicted to heroin, cocaine, and prescription drugs, he lashed out at everyone around him-from his cohosts on The Howard Stern Show to celebrity guests and even his longtime friends. Then came his legendary meltdown on-air, with 6 million people listening, after which Lange pulled himself together enough to go to a buddy's bachelor party in Amsterdam.
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[Narrator Fail] Comic Genius+Depression+Drugs=Mess
- By Hilary on 11-07-13
By: Artie Lange, and others
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Dear Fahrenheit 451
- Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
- By: Annie Spence
- Narrated by: Stephanie Spicer
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. They remove books that patrons no longer check out, and they put back books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties - everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly.
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Totally captivating
- By Grace Smith on 03-24-18
By: Annie Spence
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Lose Well
- By: Chris Gethard
- Narrated by: Chris Gethard
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Let’s face it: we all want a seat at the cool table, a great job, and loads of money. But most of us won’t be able to achieve this widely accepted, black-or-white, definition of winning, which makes us feel like failures, that we’re destined to a life of loserdom. That’s the conventional wisdom. It’s also crap, according to comedian and cult hero Chris Gethard, who knows a thing of two about losing. Failing is an art form, he argues; in fact, it’s the only the way we’re ever going to discover who we are, what we really want, and how to live the kind of life we only dreamed about.
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WHAT A LOSER
- By Amazon Customer on 01-26-19
By: Chris Gethard
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Harry, a History
- The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon
- By: Melissa Anelli
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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With remembrances from J. K. Rowling's editors, agents, publicists, fans, and Rowling herself, Melissa Anelli takes us on a personal journey through every aspect of the Harry Potter phenomenon - from his very first spell to his lasting impact on the way we live and dream.
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Relive the magic!
- By Heather on 03-19-09
By: Melissa Anelli
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Hey Mom
- By: Louie Anderson
- Narrated by: Louie Anderson
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Louie Anderson has been channeling his beloved mom in his iconic stand-up comedy for decades - but she passed away before getting to see him reach new heights with his breakout role. Hey Mom is Louie's way of catching Ora Zella Anderson up on everything that has been going on in his life, including his continued struggles with food and family, but also how so much has changed for the better. He also has plenty of laugh-out-loud stories about his incredibly resilient mother and his 10 siblings, as well as observations on the absurdities of life.
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I love Louie even more now
- By Candace on 05-02-18
By: Louie Anderson
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The Simpsons
- An Uncensored, Unauthorized History
- By: John Ortved
- Narrated by: John Allen Nelson, Justine Eyre
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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John Ortved's oral history is the first-ever look behind the scenes at the creation and day-to-day running of the television phenomenon known as The Simpsons, as told by many of the people who produce it.
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Great Content, Awful Reading
- By JH Easton on 03-13-11
By: John Ortved
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Wanna Bet?
- A Degenerate Gambler's Guide to Living on the Edge
- By: Artie Lange
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The two-time best-selling author, comedian, actor, and radio icon explains the philosophy that has kept his existence boredom-free since the age of 13 - the love of risk. An avid sports better and frequent card player, Lange believes that the true gambler gets high not from winning, but from the chaotic unknown of betting itself. He recounts some of his favorite moments, many of which haven't involved money at all. In this candid and entertaining memoir, he looks back at the times he's wagered the intangible and priceless things in life: his health, his career, and his relationships.
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who needs Artie (to read)
- By B. Wenners on 08-24-18
By: Artie Lange
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Meet Me in the Bathroom
- Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
- By: Lizzy Goodman
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston, Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 19 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In the second half of the 20th century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war.
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Deeply disappointing.
- By ChicagoRob on 01-18-20
By: Lizzy Goodman
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Charlie Joe Jackson's Guide to Not Reading
- Charlie Joe Jackson, Book 1
- By: Tommy Greenwald
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 3 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlie Joe Jackson may be the most reluctant reader ever born. And so far, he’s managed to get through life without ever reading an entire book from cover to cover. But now that he’s in middle school, avoiding reading isn’t as easy as it used to be. And when his friend Timmy McGibney decides that he’s tired of covering for him, Charlie Joe finds himself resorting to desperate measures to keep his perfect record intact. This is the hilarious story of an avid non-reader and the extreme lengths to which he’ll go to get out of reading a book.
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Laugh Out Loud with an A+ Narrator
- By Chocolate Chip Stamper on 10-24-12
By: Tommy Greenwald
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Anger Is an Energy
- My Life Uncensored
- By: John Lydon
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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John Lydon is an icon - one of the most recognizable and influential cultural figures of the last 40 years. As Johnny Rotten, he was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, the world's most notorious band. The Pistols shot to fame in the mid-1970s with songs such as "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen". So incendiary was their impact at the time that in their native England, the Houses of Parliament questioned whether they violated the Traitors and Treasons Act.
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I Just Can't
- By notamatopoeia on 12-30-15
By: John Lydon
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Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations
- By: Peter Evans, Ava Gardner
- Narrated by: William Hope
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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This wickedly candid memoir that Ava Gardner dared not publish during her lifetime offers a revealing self-portrait of the film legend's life and loves in Hollywood's golden age. Ava Gardner was one of Hollywood's great stars during the 1940s and '50s, an Oscar-nominated leading lady who co-starred with Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, and Humphrey Bogart, among others. But this riveting account of her storied life and career had to wait for publication until after her death, so concerned was Gardner with its frankness.
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Secret and Unapproved
- By CanyonCat on 10-19-13
By: Peter Evans, and others
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The King is dead, long live the King!
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Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace takes us from Aristotle to Newton, Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and finally Georg Cantor and his set theory. Through it all, Wallace proves to be an ideal guide - funny, wry, and unfailingly enthusiastic. Featuring an introduction by Neal Stephenson, this edition is a perfect introduction to the beauty of mathematics and the undeniable strangeness of the infinite.
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Equations via audio are tuff
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David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
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This is ABRIDGED
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The David Foster Wallace Reader
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Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.
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Impossible to use without Chapter Names
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Max avoids hagiography or a sycophant's biography
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With footnotes!
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The King is dead, long live the King!
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This is ABRIDGED
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Impossible to use without Chapter Names
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For two first-class years, Joan Freeley had it all: the perfect family, the best art dealer in Manhattan, and the admiration of famous friends. Her adoring husband and two handsome sons attended her first gallery show in matching khakis and blue blazers. "An Interesting Talent Makes Its Debut," declared the New York Times. Then, as if her success were nothing more than a booking error, Joan's life got downgraded. A brutal divorce led to paintings too bitter to sell and a career stuck firmly in coach.
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Wow, you enter an interesting world
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From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.
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This book is not NOT a Datsun!
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Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
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The best book on Audible!
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Consider the Lobster (A Story from Consider the Lobster)
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Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures.
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How this differs from the other version
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The Broom of the System
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Performance
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At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind-numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great-grandmother, a one-time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.
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Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
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Gravity's Rainbow
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
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By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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This Is Water
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How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.
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Too short for what you pay for!
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
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Wonderful book, terrible narration!
- By Karen on 08-20-13
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Oblivion
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In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
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Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
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The Parrot and the Igloo
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In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE'S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, bestselling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.
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Depressing
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Absolutely American
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As David Lipsky follows a future generation of army officers from their proving grounds to their barracks, he reveals the range of emotions and desires that propels these men and women forward. From the cadet who struggles with every facet of West Point life to those who are decidedly huah, Lipsky shows people facing challenges so daunting and responsibilities so heavy that their transformations are fascinating to watch.
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He got it right.
- By Andrew on 05-15-04
By: David Lipsky
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
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- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Rupert Degas
- Length: 26 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
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Wonderful book, flawed narration.
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By: Haruki Murakami
What listeners say about Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dtaylor
- 06-26-17
great for dfw fans
this book is full of insights and humor for all to enjoy. even non-dfw fans will like this book, but true fans will love it.
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- D. Martin
- 07-01-12
Worth it for the serious Wallace fan only
I love DFW, and have read or listened to almost everything he wrote. If you're looking for a Wallace listen, I'd probably go with Consider the Lobster if you're up for non-fiction, or else Girl with Curious Hair or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men if you're looking for fiction.
For those of us obsessed with Wallace, AOCYEUBY is a worthwhile, interesting listen, which provides a great window into the inner Wallace. It also made me interested to read more by David Lipsky.
But for anyone who's not already obsessed with Wallace, I just can't imagine why you'd spend your time on this.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Steven
- 09-10-15
Glad to get an insight on such great author
What made the experience of listening to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself the most enjoyable?
It was so well done. It felt like you were hanging out with Lipsky and he was telling you about his times with David Foster Wallace. I wished the book was 20 hours, the time flew by.
Who was your favorite character and why?
I loved getting to hear about everyday things about Wallace. What he liked and a feel for his lifestyle. These things are so interesting because you think about his work you don't think about how he was with his dogs and what songs he liked.
Which scene was your favorite?
The talks about writers, what IJ meant to him after it had been released. Wallace seemed so down to earth and I think that is important in what makes a writer's material worth anything in the end. I am no scholar obviously, but I don't get why he was so embarrassed by Broom of the System.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
I liked how he didn't talk down about many people, he was familiar with the work of other writers I enjoy. I am glad this was made and any Wallace fan will know why on their own.
Any additional comments?
The Narrators did a tremendous job going back and forth.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 08-27-12
Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
At first, I thought Lipsky was kind of operating in that opportunist zone (and I'm sure there is a little of that, b/c journalism never can claim to be opportunisticly free). Lipsky had, packed away, tapes and tapes of unused RS interviews with DFW. DFW has just killed himself, wow, a perfect time to rush it to press. The more I read and listened, however, the more I realized in many ways I preferred the rough, transcription-like, quality of the book AND that it wasn't as simple as it first appeared.
The dialogue between Lipsky and Wallace provided an interesting, unfiltered look into Wallace's method and a peek into his head (even though ultimately, I think Wallace was guarding that sanctum sanctorum pretty well). Wallace, during the road-trip interview, once remarked that writing was an intimate connection of the writer's brain voice with the reader's brain voice. Later, he expanded this theme when talking about how there are things that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can't do as well --
"And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin' over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate coversation between two consciences. And the trick is gonna be finding a way to do it at a time, and for a generation, whose relation to long sustained linear verbal communication is fundamentally different."
So, in that way, Lipsky's piece, while appearing at first to provide just a simple throw-up of all those unused RS interview notes and tapes, actually provides an avenue to see DFW's intimate 'brain voice' conversation. While at one level Lipsky has given us an interesting conversation between the author and DFW, it ultimately seemed to be a conversation DFW is having with himself (Lipsky here seems like a pretty good looking-glass for David Foster Wallace).
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23 people found this helpful
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- Greg Wilson
- 01-05-12
Worthwhile for me
I'm glad I used a credit on Lipsky's book. Wallace's writing has been reviewed as revolutionary satire, lampooning our current civilization. When I read some of his works, the Broom, Hideous Men etc. I only found a depressed, angry man railing at not being able to make sense of it all.
This books peek at the man Wallace bore me out in my estimation and saved me time, effort and credits that I might have spent on more Wallace works. However other than that the book has no value what so ever.
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- Marcelo D. Viana Neto
- 03-31-14
Oh what a disappointment...
Is there anything you would change about this book?
It's a wonderful book, but the performance almost ruined it for me. It's not that it's bad, it's that it's misses the mark so entirely... If you've ever heard David F. Wallace speak, you'll know what I mean. He had a gentle voice, what inflection there was it came through in his mid-westernisms, yet the narrator here has a sine wave type of intonation that makes him sound like someone completely different. A great performer, but a very wrong cast for this book, unfortunately.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Mike Chamberlain and Danny Campbell ?
I would cast someone with a less affected performance and gentler voice, but this isn't my job so I can only lament.
Any additional comments?
I recommend reading the book instead.
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- Del
- 08-19-16
Along for the ride
Patchwork quilt of a novel. Created by an author invested and respectful of his subject.
Its always fascinating to eavesdrop on interesting conversations. Though this felt more like I was along for the ride.
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- Sarah C
- 11-26-12
Mutual strokefest
The structure and methods of this book were really novel and interesting--like one reviewer said, a four-part piece for typewriter or a Tom Stoppard play in two voices. I enjoyed Lipsky's account of a 5-day road trip with DFW, but the flirtation and flattery and mutual masturbation got a bit tiresome. Maybe I tired of the one-upmanship and competitiveness evident in the interview because I'm female and just don't function this way in conversation, even conversaton with a brilliant and talented person (not that I've had that many of those). I thought the two narrators' voices were excellent and helped to flesh out the give and take and the involuted recursiveness of DFW's thinking. He was very guarded about his biographical details (DT Max's recent bio contradicts several assertions made by DFW in this interview) and obviously wanted to control the essay Lipsky planned to write for Rolling Stone (the essay was never published). But I was surprised at the seeming need to impress his interviewer and convince him that he was just like him, when in fact DFW is like no one else I've ever read or heard speak. To his credit, Lipsky acknowledges the flirtation and flattery going on, with little editorial asides, and I guess this is just the way intellectual males talk to one another, with both trying to establish the pecking order without openly engaging in feats of strength. I wouldn't have guessed DFW had such a need to please! or be admired. In the end, this is an interesting interview done in a novel way, but is probably only going to appeal to completist fans of DFW's work. The DT Max biography is more informative and less irritating.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-23-19
Left me in tears
As an avid DFW fanatic AOCYEUBY was an insightful window into what, for me, was a really beautiful, charming, heartbreaking, and reassuring journey alongside an author who had felt such pain he needed to end his life years before I would ever read his work. A very well done audiobook and I found it to be so touching. And so interesting to hear DFW talk about fans with whom I certainly identify and to hear DFW discuss how it’s weird interacting with them because they feel such an intimate connection and they’re looking for him to reciprocate and that’s just not possible. But during these 10+ hours it is, in a way, possible to share that time with this mind in whom I have found such precious companionship.
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- cat's pajamas
- 07-31-12
Fan(tods) Fiction
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I would recommend this to a friend who is a David Foster Wallace fan. I think something would be lost without coming to this without having read DFW.
What did you like best about this story?
I've got to say that it was great to have a voyeuristic peek into DFW's life. Sure, it's much more than that - but the sense you got from a DFW essay of knowing him - this delivers the same dope.
What does Mike Chamberlain and Danny Campbell bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?
The highest praise I have for a narrator - any narrator - is that they are not annoying. Mike and Danny are not annoying.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No - akin to a DFW work, there's just too much to take in for an "all in one sitting" thing.
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4 people found this helpful